New on board: Sub-Lieutenant Royce, commissioned three months, sea experience three months in an Asdic trawler, aged twenty.

His commanding officer is Lieutenant Harston, aged twenty-three. His predecessor has been killed in action forty-eight hours earlier and is now hardly remembered. The crew are all young - some very young - but all old before their time.

Royce realised that on the little ships it was a young man's war - the horizon was always near.